August 28, 2024
How do you meet the challenge of constantly shifting consumer needs? Meet the team that always has a finger on the food pulse.
Understanding what your consumers want and why is the basis of any good business, but people’s needs and desires are constantly changing. Take enriched foods and drinks, for example. It used to be a topic that most people paid little attention to, but today, the future possibilities for this area is an essential question for the food and beverage industry.
So, how can you keep up with trends and regulations to ensure that your business stays on top – and how can you create marketing strategies that are fresh, flexible, and fit for a world in flux?
Anna Larsson, Business Insights Leader at Tetra Pak, has worked with consumer insights for decades. Together with fellow Business Insights Leader Mikael Adolfsson, she provides insights to her customer-facing colleagues so they can deliver the perfect packages, content, and processing lines.
“The media has shed some light on food processing recently, but there is still a lot of education and learning to be done,” Anna says. “Concerns around processed food are often oversimplified: it’s not always as black and white as whether a product is good or bad for you.”
A new paradigm for processed foods
The meaning of processed food has changed in recent years, both practically and in terms of public perception. Many processed foods today are enriched with extra vitamins, proteins, or other beneficial nutrients – and these are making strides in changing commonly held ideas about the category.
“We need to be transparent about processing food and what it means,” says Mikael. “It doesn’t have to be this strange, mysterious process. It can offer many benefits, and we need to communicate those. People will buy products that align with their needs and values.”
"We can find out where and which consumers are looking for a product to satisfy a specific craving at a specific time of day or how an existing product would be more popular if packaged and marketed differently."
And really, Anna suggests, the possibilities promised by food processing can’t be overlooked when a third of all food is wasted globally.
“How will we feed a population that will increase by almost 2 billion by 2050?” she says. “When you look at it in the context of global hunger, we’re going to need food processing to make a positive change.”
Meeting consumer needs today and tomorrow
Anna and Mikael mainly provide an outside perspective on what goes on inside the company.
“We spend a lot of time understanding what internal stakeholders want to know about consumers, trends and regulations so we can support the processing and packaging experts with insights and help guide their decision-making when they’re developing solutions for customers,” says Mikael.
Their input is just as important for new customers and solutions as it is for existing ones. The insights are all about making the experts’ work relevant, meaningful, and future-proof.
“Typically, we want to understand something about food and beverage categories or consumer perception of our packaging,” Anna says. “We want to fulfil the needs of consumers both today and tomorrow.” And that's where the newly launched Demand Spaces model comes in.
Demand-spaces research spots the unmet needs
Demand Spaces is an advanced analytical tool for customers looking for new business opportunities. Using data gathered from 78,000 interviews and 130,000 consumption occasions across 25 markets, it is a segmentation based on variables such as persona, occasion, and need – and helps identify areas where current products aren’t meeting consumers' needs.
“We can find out where and which consumers are looking for a product to satisfy a specific craving at a specific time of day or how an existing product would be more popular if packaged and marketed differently,” Anna explains.
"Consumers don’t really understand alternative proteins, and they’re a bit unsure of them because they’re new – but they are becoming a bigger part of our foods. This requires the industry to be transparent and give consumers the reassurance they need."
Mikael points out that the Demand Spaces methodology is a well-known approach many big brands use to segment their consumers and markets. But unlike other companies, Tetra Pak can include the packaging side, not just the product inside the package.
“We can look at both functional needs, like which package would work best for milk in a certain market – or more emotional needs, like, what would an environmentally concerned person want if they need to rehydrate on the go?” he explains. “It’s always possible to find an angle, even in a well-established category like tomato paste or yoghurt. It’s just about finding the smaller areas where you can optimise.”
Some ideas are just crazy enough to work
If Anna and Mikael pinpoint a demand for products with high vitamin or good-for-your-gut content, they might share this information with their marketing and sales colleagues, who can then talk to customers and see if there might be a fit.
“One of the fun parts of our job is that we're not supposed to know everything about the details of how to make products, so we get to come up with crazy ideas,” says Mikael. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Take biotics, for example, a category that includes pre-, pro-, and post-biotics, all of which are currently popular in dairy. So why aren’t they being used in other areas – juice drinks for kids, for example?
“Thinking like this can sometimes lead to revolutionary products,” says Mikael.
According to Anna, the evolution of health tech and how we track personal health will continue to grow over the coming years. With the ability to track different biomarkers, people will soon demand more personalised products that target specific health needs and outcomes.
Alternative proteins are creeping into our foods
A big trend that both insight gatherers are monitoring is alternative proteins. These can hypothetically provide nutritional value much better than farmed pigs or chickens, for example, if you include the sustainability and ethical parts of the equation.1
“Consumers don’t really understand alternative proteins, and they’re a bit unsure of them because they’re new – but they are becoming a bigger part of our foods,” explains Mikael.
“This requires the industry to be transparent and give consumers the reassurance they need. Many things on the radar here will be challenging, but traceability, transparency, and honesty will lead the way.”
We can look at both functional needs, like which package would work best for milk in a certain market – or more emotional needs, like, what would an environmentally concerned person want if they need to rehydrate on the go?
An alternative protein might be created inside a fermentation tank, requiring no animals to be harmed and taking little toll on the environment – and the development of new technologies is also helping to speed up acceptance of these new foods.
Monitoring regulations to future-proof the business
To ensure everyone is prepared for what’s coming down the line, Anna and Mikael research and develop perspectives on future regulations, which direction the industry is moving in, what consumers will be asking for, and how these aspects affect projects in development.
Sometimes, the industry undergoes a big shift. If consumers aren’t properly informed, there will be resistance, like when tethered caps became a requirement to limit plastic waste in nature.
“We need to be ahead of things like this and share tips and tricks with consumers that make their lives easier and help them accept changes,” says Mikael.
Design for recycling is an example of a regulation that is murky at the moment. What impact will it have on the industry?
“Legislation is still being drafted, but we already understood that going down the plastic path will not be the most brilliant idea in 10 years,” says Mikael. “I think the work we’re doing to increase the amount of renewable materials in our paper-based carton packages, for example, will prove very significant when these legislations start to go into effect.”
Essentially, Anna says, future-proofing the company and business is all about examining the impact of all these different angles on the products and packaging on offer and ensuring you're ready for every possible scenario.
“At the end of the day, our perspective is just one of the many puzzle pieces. That’s why it’s so exciting to work at a company that has all the experts needed to shape the products of the future,” says Anna.
Looking for even more insights? Check out our latest research on trends and consumers.
